


new cornerstone: a reconstruction

by mandalorianed



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Dysfunctional Family, Family Bonding, Gen, Light Angst, Suitless Vader
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-05-03 22:01:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5308523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mandalorianed/pseuds/mandalorianed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Luke had imagined finding out who his parents were, he had never imagined this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	new cornerstone: a reconstruction

**Author's Note:**

> This is a completely self-indulgent suit-less!Vader fic. I apologize for nothing, including the complete lack of coherent world building in this. Honestly, at this point if you were to ask me, "What happened to such-and-such character and are they alive," the answer is probably, "I have no idea and yes." Also a more accurate tag for this would be "everybody lives but no one is happy," but unfortunately that wasn't an option.
> 
> Find me on Tumblr [here](http://mandalorianed.tumblr.com/) for more Star Wars and occasional cats.

**I.**

The air presses down on his skin, heat oozing liquid down the back of his neck. And the wind. The wind whips up stinging sand grains, hurls them in his face. Just once, Luke thinks, just once he’d like to be able to go to bed without shaking handfuls of the stuff out of his clothes. He hates the sand, hates the way its roughness has given him callouses on his feet, and the way he can never get it all out of the workroom so that it inevitably ends up embedding itself in some delicate piece of circuitry.

“Luke,” Aunt Beru chides, drawing his attention back to the present, hot moment. “Bocce. Make sure it speaks bocce.”

“I don’t think we have much of a choice,” he yells back at her, small in the main courtyard forty feet below him. “But I’ll remind uncle.”

And he does, although his uncle only responds with a vague nod, all his attention on the heat-cracked droids in front of him. He’s already selected two: a golden plated protocol droid and a red astromech.

“We’ll take these two,” he says to one of the jawas. And then to Luke, “I want these two cleaned up by dinner.”

Luke’s brows pull together. “But I was gonna go to the Tosche Station to pick up some power convertors. If I can just find two or three, I think…”

But he’s already being cut off. “You can waste time with your friends after your chores are done.”

His uncle’s already turned back towards the jawas, so Luke doesn’t push it, just leads the two droids off. At least until the red one starts venting steam and is replaced by a much newer model, this time blue.

“If I could just find a few convertors I could totally boost the X-34’s power output by at least 15%,” he says to no one in particular. The astromech rolling at his heels whistles loudly, and Luke decides to take it for agreement. “Thanks, little guy.”

 

 

**II.**

Both suns have set completely, and Luke knows he should go home, but the wall of the Tosche Station is warm at his back and Biggs, sitting at his shoulder, is passing him the canteen of cheap liquor again.

“What’s got you so wound up anyway,” Biggs asks as he watches Luke idly dig a hole in the sand only to fill it in again almost immediately.

Luke sighs, thinks about Biggs’s confession earlier that he’s finally leaving this dust ball, leaving in a few days, and his even quieter one that he was leaving to join the Rebellion. He digs another hole in the sand, then makes up his mind.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ve gotta show you something.”

And he does. He catches the little astromech trying to make its way out into the desert on his way back home and loads it into the speeder, chastising it soundly. Biggs laughs at him.

“Why don’t you have a restraining bolt on this thing,” he asks as they set the droid down in Luke’s workshop.

“That’s what I want to show you,” Luke replies grimly. “Now come on, let’s see it. At least let us see her.”

The droid clicks, whistles once, and then makes a distinct raspberry. Luke doesn’t need to understand binary to know that whatever it said, it wasn’t complimentary.

“Come on,” he says, sitting down heavily on the floor and smacking one of the droid’s wheel housings. “I’m trying to help you, kriff it. I’m trying to get you back to her.”

There’s a long moment where Luke gets the distinct feeling that the droid is weighing him very carefully. And then it leans forward and a blue stream of light pours from its hologram projector. There’s the woman again, the beautiful woman dressed all in white. The image is frozen, but after a moment she begins to speak, clearly in the middle of the message.

“—You served with my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire.” The message skips. “—My mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed. I,” another skip. “—Vital to the survival of the Rebellion in— My father will know—” and then the message fizzles out completely.

Luke is nearly positive that the droid is doing it on purpose, that there’s more to the message that it isn’t showing him, but Biggs is grabbing at his arm, his eyes glued to the spot where the woman had just been.

“That’s Leia Organa,” he says, eyes wide. “That’s Senator Leia Organa. You’ve got to get this astromech somewhere safe.”

 

 

**III.**

When Luke has thought “safe,” he hadn’t thought this. He hadn’t thought of fleeing from stormtroopers in the dead of night with two droids packed into his landspeeder. He hadn’t thought of the image of his aunt and uncle, dead in the burned out husk of his home (their home), burned into his eyes. He hadn’t thought to have bartered his way off Tatooine with a smuggler with an ego the size and intensity of both of Tatooine’s twin suns.

And he hadn’t thought of this moment, this frozen moment. The droids are already in the Falcon. Leia is running after them, soot and blaster residue all over her white dress, her hair falling out of its buns, and Solo is just behind her, a white knuckled grip on his gun. And then Luke, turning to face a hallway out of which is pouring a flood of white armored troops and, in the middle of them, a man dressed all in black.

Time slows to a crawl, and Luke feels like he can pick out every detail of the scene laid out in front of him. He’s had moments like these before, usually when he’s in his skyhopper looking at an impossibly narrow canyon, knowing down to his marrow that he will be able to fly through it. He knows now, as surely as he has known anything in his life, that if he doesn’t turn now and begin to fire, the Falcon will never make it out of the launch bay. He also knows that if he does so, he’ll never get to the Falcon. It doesn’t matter.

So he just does, and tries not to think. He hears Leia yelling after him, but he merely takes aim at the man in black and shouts at her.

“Go!”

He isn’t looking at her, but somehow he can see the way resignation hangs heavy on her as she realizes the same thing he already knows. He takes out three troopers before he feels the hot backwash of the Falcon’s engines on his back. One of his shots flies toward the darkly dressed man’s face, but he swats it out of the air as if it were just an irritating insect. He points at Luke.

“Seize him.”

 

 

**IV.**

The man in black is sitting across from him now. Up close he looks much older than he had when he’d been striding towards Luke with murder in his eyes, and much more like some distinguished general. His clothes, all black, are military cut but bear no insignia of rank. Both his hands are sheathed in dark leather gloves, and his hair, long and mostly gray, is pulled back from his temples with a simple black thong. His left eye is crossed with a nasty, though faded, jagged scar, and his skin is creased around his mouth, as if he frowns often.

And he is starring at Luke with his unsettling amber eyes, as if he is considering carefully ripping him apart. Suddenly Luke knows exactly how a nerf feels when it is starring down a butcher, and he shifts uncomfortably, clenching and unclenching his fists where they are bound in front of him.

“You’re a good shot,” the man finally says, leaning back in his chair and crossing one leg over the other. “Too bad you’ve taken up with the Rebels, you would’ve made a good trooper.”

Luke says nothing and stares at the other man, wondering if this is the prelude to being left to rot in some Imperial detention cell for the rest of his life. If it is, he wishes he would just get on with it. The man looks like he’s about to speak again, but then the door chimes and a woman in a starched navy uniform enters.

“Lord Vader,” the woman says. And then she says something afterwards, but Luke’s ears have gone slightly fuzzy.

Ah, he thinks vaguely. He’s not going to rot in some cell. He’s going to die. Probably right now.

Lord Vader is speaking again, and Luke listens numbly. “Tell me your name, Rebel.”

“Luke,” he says without thinking. “Luke Skywalker.”

At that, Vader tenses. He had been leaning back in his chair, clearly at ease, but now he is sitting up and leaning forward.

“What did you say,” he asks with deadly calm.

Luke can feel his blood freezing in his veins. “Luke Skywalker.”

Vader’s eyes narrow. “Skywalker. For your father?”

Luke nods, bewildered. “He was a freighter pilot. Died during the Clone Wars in a piloting accident.”

Strangely enough, Vader looks slightly affronted at that. “And your mother?”

“I never knew her,” he says, uncomfortable. Uncle Owen had always refused to even mention her, but Aunt Beru had told him what she knew, which wasn’t much. That she had been young when he was born. That she had been a senator. That she was very beautiful. He had never even known her name. “What does this matter?”

Lord Vader, who had been slowly leaning further and further towards him, freezes, his face pursed into a faintly snared expression.

“It doesn’t,” he says, still frozen. “Of course. It doesn’t matter at all.”

He leans back and then hits a button on the control panel embedded in his chair arm. Two stormtroopers appear in the doorway.

“Take him back to his cell,” Vader says, picking up a datapad off his desk and starring at it intently.

He doesn’t look up as Luke is lead away.

 

 

**V.**

Captivity, Luke finds, is mostly just filled with profound boredom. No one had interrogated him after his aborted interview with Vader, so really the only interaction he’d had in the past, oh, he thought maybe four days, was with droids. One of them, which was shaped like a tall, bulbous hat rack, entered his cell every day, stripped him, sanitized him, and then left, presumably to move on to the next unfortunate. The other was only a mechanized arm that gave him food at semi-regular intervals.

Plus, to add insult to injury and invasion of privacy, they had let him keep his clothes and utility belt, but had stripped it of absolutely everything he had carried on it. They had even taken the bits of circuitry that he carried around with him to tinker with if he got bored. Of course, he supposed that it made sense that they would have taken away his tool kit, but really, what was he going to do with a miniaturized soldering iron? Stab a stormtrooper in the neck?

So now he is left to his own devices, which in this case means lying on his back on his slab of a bunk and kicking at the wall. It is late, at least according to his system that is still mostly set on Tatooine time, which means that it is probably about 0200 hours standard.

And then, shockingly, the door slides open to reveal two stormtroopers who, unlike all the ones Luke has seen so far, have blue stripes painted on their helmets.

“Up you get,” one of them mutters, hauling him upright. “Lord Vader wants to see you.”

 

Lord Vader did indeed want to see him. When Luke was finally delivered, hands bound again, the man was pacing in front of the huge viewport that took up most of the wall of the room. He had stopped when Luke was deposited in the chair, and now he is standing with his back to it, facing out into the room. It is a different room from the last one. While it still has a desk with two chairs in front of it, it is clearly also a living area, with two couches and a large, low table.

And it is messy, the first properly disorganized space Luke has seen since stepping foot on the enormous space station. There are datapads scattered across the desk and, somehow strangely reassuringly, a deactivated protocol droid sitting on the couch, all its plating pulled off and its motivator sitting half pulled apart on the table, clearly an ongoing project.

Vader’s outer jacket is open, revealing an (predictably black) undershirt, and he’s crossed his arms across his chest. For a few minutes, they just stare at each other. Then Vader finally speaks.

“Tell me everything you know about your father.”

It comes out in a rumble, threatening like a storm cloud or a tornado. Luke can practically feel the words pressing in on him. Vader hasn’t moved closer to him, but Luke feels like he has, feels like Vader has gotten bigger.

“I already did,” he says, clenching his hands into fists to stop them from shaking. “That’s all I know, my aunt and uncle wouldn’t tell me anything else.”

Vader snorts, and then whirls around and walks back to the viewport.

“Typical,” he mutters as he walks. And then, apropos of nothing, “You’re nineteen.”

It’s not a question, so Luke doesn’t answer it. He just sits, and watches Vader grow physically tenser while the heavy press of something, maybe danger, or maybe anger or regret or fear or all of them together, in the air only deepens. He whishes, suddenly, that the stormtroopers were still in the room. That anyone else was in the room so that it wasn’t just him and this dangerous, lean man.

“I’ll tell you then,” he says, not turning. It’s as if he’s speaking to the starfield instead of the boy in the chair behind him. “Anakin Skywalker was a Jedi Knight who trained on Coruscant, fought in the Clone Wars, and then died on Mustafar.”

The last word is spat as if it is venom.

“And then,” Vader turns suddenly, stalking towards Luke until he is standing right over him, hands planted on the arms of the chair, blocking him in. “Then he was reborn. And he stands before you.”

Luke shrinks back despite himself, almost on animal instinct, but he feels like his breath has caught tight in his chest. There is a ringing in his ears, and he can’t force himself to breathe. And then, suddenly, the pressure is gone and Vader is standing up straight again and backing up to lean on his desk, running his hands through his hair before rubbing at his eyes. The numbness, however, has remained.

“That’s not possible,” Luke finally whispers. “He was an honorable man and he died honorably. You can’t be him.”

Vader’s face twists. “I’ve been many things, but never that.”

And then there is a long silence, one that stretches for almost a quarter of an hour. Luke lifts shaking hands to cover his face and then just sits, slumped in his chair. Finally, at some unseen prompting of Lord Vader, the stormtroopers reenter and Luke sits up straight again, eyeing them and trying to ignore the dark figure in front of the desk, who is still starring at him with an unintelligible expression on his face.

“Here,” Vader says, and Luke looks up just in time to see Vader throw a holoprojector at him. It hits him in the chest and bounces into his lap, hitting hard enough to make him wince.

“Newsreel footage,” Vader says, expressionless. “Search your feelings,” he adds, a sarcastic twist to the words that Luke doesn’t understand. “You know it to be true.”

Luke just lets himself be led back to his cell, the only sound the thudding of the troopers’ boots against the shiny station floors.

 

 

**VI.**

It is, in fact, old newsreel footage. The picture is slightly degraded, but he can still read the scroll along the bottom of the screen. “Republic triumphs again!” It reads, scrolling in front of a celebrating crowd. “The Hero With No Fear can do no wrong! Anakin Skywalker frees Enkailon IV!” Then it cuts to a shot of someone who is clearly a younger Vader, but here he is dressed in dark robes, a lightsaber at his belt that looks like the one that Vader wears. And, more shockingly, he is smiling, a true grin, and he has an arm slung around the shoulders of another man, this one in cream-colored robes, who looks considerably less pleased to be there. It’s a grin that’s eerily familiar, one that Luke has seen on his own face in pictures.

It could be edited, Luke thinks as soon as it’s over. But suddenly, the cold reality of this nightmare washes over him. What reason would Lord Vader, the Emperor’s enforcer and right hand, have for claiming some nobody from a Rim planet as his son? What could he possibly hope to gain? The cold weight of it settles on his shoulders. And then he hurls the projector at the wall, watching it crack down the middle, and lays down, his back towards the dead piece of equipment.

Now he thinks he might recognize the look on Vader’s face as he had given him the holoprojector. He thinks it might have been pity.

 

 

**VII.**

He’s only been on the station for five days, he realizes numbly as he’s once again marched into Vader’s private office, the one with the couch. And it’s only been ten since he left Tatooine. It feels like months.

The troopers just leave him standing by the door, his hands unbound for once, and then he’s alone again with Vader. This time, the man is sitting on the couch next to the disassembled protocol droid. His outer jacket’s off, so that Luke can see the heavy scaring that spikes up from each of his prosthetic hands. The gloves are off too, fully revealing the copper plated prosthetics, and he’s working on the droids arm, adjusting servos. Luke almost can’t tell the difference between the droid and Lord Vader. The droid and his father. Vader doesn’t even glance up.

“I see you’ve accepted the truth,” he says.

Luke doesn’t say anything, just sinks onto the opposite couch.

“What about my mother,” he asks as Vader manipulates the arm, pausing to tweak some small piece of circuitry.

Vader pauses in his work for a moment, and then says, “She was a senator in the old Republic senate.”

“I know that,” Luke snaps, suddenly fed up with everything, with this weight Vader has placed on him. “What was her name?”

He hesitates, but eventually says, “Padmé. Her name was Padmé.”

“Padmé,” Luke whispers, trying out the name, matching it with the gentle woman he imagines his mother to be. Soft, with long curling brown hair and kind eyes. Everything that the man sitting across from him, all angles and hard edges, isn’t. “What happened to her.”

“She died,” he says shortly. “Just after the end of the Clone Wars.”

“Oh,” Luke says, one last hope shattered.

Vader’s hand spasmodically tightens around the droid arm.

And then he says, so quietly Luke almost misses it, “You have her eyes.”

Luke doesn’t know what to do with that, so he just sits in silence and watches Vader tinker with the protocol droid until finally the stormtroopers enter to return him to his cell.

 

 

  **VIII.**

Luke still isn’t entirely certain he knows how he ended up where he is. That is, sitting in the open hatch of an Imperial shuttle on the surface of the fourth moon of Yavin, his legs drawn up to his chest, sobbing. Well, he knows what _happened._ What happened was that Vader, unaccompanied by any stormtroopers, had opened his cell and dragged him bodily from it. Then, with a bruising grip on Luke’s upper arms, he had more or less frog-marched him into a small hanger and shoved him into the shuttle whose hatch he was now sitting in.

“This,” he had said, jabbing at the navicomputer, anger clear in the lines of his face. “Is the Rebel base your princess has flown to. Go there.”

And then he had spun on his heel and stormed from the shuttle, allowing Luke to take off before he could change his mind. And now he was here, and someone was coming through the forest. And yes, unless it is a mirage generated by the awful humid heat (and he had thought Tatooine was bad. At least that had been a dry heat.), that is Leia picking her way towards the ship. When she sees him, she breaks into a run through the waist high weeds that blanket the clearing, and, a moment later, she has wrapped her arms around his neck.

“I thought I was never going to see you again,” she says, gripping him tightly. “I thought you died in a blaze of glory and I was never going to get a chance to thank you.”

And suddenly, it’s all too much. Even just sitting here, lettering her hold him, feels like a lie, so he tells her everything. By the end of it, Leia’s sitting beside him, shoulder to shoulder.

There’s silence for a moment afterwards, and then Leia says very quietly, “I thought there was something about you.”

Luke’s head shoots up, horror on his face at the idea that that kind of darkness is somehow evident in him even to a passing acquaintance, but he finds that Leia is looking at him with an indescribable tenderness in her eyes.

“Luke,” she says quietly. “There’s someone you need to meet.”

 

 

She leads him through the upset hornets’ nest that is the Rebel base, weaving through throngs of people, until they finally reach what can only be the war room. Presiding over it are two woman, so similar in height and looks that they could be twins, both with dark hair turned mostly silver. One is dressed in fatigues, the other in a neat white jumpsuit with a heavy cream shawl thrown around her shoulders. It is the later whom Leia approaches, gently touching her arm and then whispering in her ear. She turns to stare very intently at Leia, and then she looks back to the other commanding officer, but only for a moment.

“Sabé,” she says, to the other woman. “Manage things here for a few minutes. My daughter has brought something pressing to my attention.”

And then she walks towards him. Now that she’s closer, he can see the angry burn scars that arc across her neck and cheek, twisting and warping her skin, but even so she’s striking, with a regal bearing and sharp, intelligent eyes. She sweeps past him, motioning for both him and Leia to follow her. It’s not until they reach an empty room piled high with crates and close the door that she finally turns fully towards him.

There’s a look of blooming joy on her face as she does so. She reaches out and gently takes his face in her hands and stares at him. He can see the tears standing in her eyes, and suddenly he knows, just as bone deep as he had when he had looked at the advancing stormtroopers and seen the face of his destiny.

“Luke,” she whispers. “Luke, my son.”

And then she pulls him to her and loops an arm around Leia as well. This moment, Luke thinks, may be the only moment of peace he has for years, but it will be enough. It must be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> ****End Note Updated 10/1/16****
> 
>  
> 
> Ok, so I am not done with this universe or this story. However, at the moment real life and, more specifically, my senior thesis, are eating up all of my time and energy. Currently, I'm planning on continuing this story during the **summer of 2017**. The finished product will probably be around 50K and will cover from A New Hope to post Return of the Jedi. When I do begin to post it, for the sake of the people who have bookmarked this, I will update this story to redirect to the new one, which I will post separately.
> 
> Until then, keep an eye on my profile for the occasional shortfic and, as always, you can find me on [tumblr](http://bobafett.tumblr.com/).


End file.
